MILBANK: America's own mystery flight

WASHINGTON — It took off with a clear destination but then veered off course and disappeared. Several countries joined the search for answers and offered conflicting theories about what went wrong.

I speak, of course, of the U.S. attempt to keep Vladimir Putin from taking Crimea.

Any resemblance between Russia’s annexation of the Ukrainian province and the tragedy of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 is purely coincidental. But both have been humbling.

The search in Asia showed that, for all our global connectivity and surveillance technology, a jumbo jet can vanish without a trace. And events in Ukraine revealed that, though the United States likes to call itself the world’s only superpower, it had no ability to stop Russia from lopping off a chunk of a neighbor.

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The first -- part mystery, part thriller -- is more captivating. But it distracted us from the second, which is a serious statement on the limits of American power in the 21st century. Russia perpetrated the first annexation of one European country’s territory by another since World War II -- and its leaders literally scoffed at U.S. objections and sanctions.

The neocons say the Ukraine invasion is a result of President Obama’s weakness, brought about by his administration’s attempt at a conciliatory “reset” of relations with Russia and his failure to enforce his ultimatum in Syria. Putin, by contrast, justified the invasion in a speech last week by citing American military actions in Iraq and other states and quoting George W. Bush’s with-us-or-against-us philosophy.

For those who believe in American power, reality is more difficult to accept than either of those explanations. We didn’t cause the Russian annexation of Crimea, and we can’t stop it. The world just isn’t that into us.

“This has very little to do with the U.S. posture in the last few years. It’s a trend that’s been developing under Putin since he came to power,” says Stephen Hanson, a Russia specialist at the College of William & Mary. “We should not be looking backward and blaming the United States. We should be looking to contain Putin.”

A former top official on Bush’s national-security team acknowledged to me that there’s not much that can be done now to stop Putin in Crimea; he simply said Obama could have prevented it from coming to this. Maybe so. And maybe Flight 370 was hijacked by an Iranian traveling on a stolen passport. Or it was flown to North Korea. Or Pakistan, where it’s being weaponized to attack Israel. Or it crashed on an uninhabited island. Or the Illuminati were involved. Or there’s an Asian version of the Bermuda Triangle. Or something supernatural happened. Or it was sucked into a black hole.

While we’re speculating, allow me to add another: Maybe Putin did it, as a diversion. As we searched the oceans, he finished the job in Crimea.

By the time President Obama spoke in the White House driveway Thursday morning, the Russian takeover was a done deal. Obama was really warning about “further incursions.” In a conference call with reporters a few minutes later, administration officials justified the restrained U.S. response, saying “we don’t want to take steps to add to a momentum of further militarizing the situation.”

Even the president’s most hawkish critics acknowledge there is no military option in Ukraine. The best the United States and European Union can do is prop up Ukraine’s economy, while NATO assures Poland and the Baltic states it will live up to its defense commitments. The range of choices really comes down to how to “calibrate” sanctions, as the administration puts it.

Severe economic sanctions -- targeting Russia’s energy industry, for example -- could provoke a bigger crisis in the region while scuttling Russian cooperation on nuclear proliferation and Iran talks. But the limited sanctions unveiled so far by the United States and Europe risk being ineffective -- such as Thursday’s targeting of the 17th-largest bank in Russia. Putin mocked this choice of a “middle-sized bank” (he said he would open an account there) and then promptly signed a law finalizing Russia’s takeover of Crimea.

On Thursday’s administration conference call, The Washington Post’s Karen DeYoung noted that “the Russians don’t seem to have been deterred by what you’ve done.”

“People may think that 1/8the sanctions 3/8 are a mere wrist-slap,” an official protested. “I can assure them that they are not.”

Maybe he’s right. Or maybe we’re just trying to convince ourselves that we’re something more than spectators.